Crossing dangerous mountains on narrow paths

If you have written about all ten thousand crossing then it will come off as lacking.

Focus on a couple of individuals and give the reader a personal insight, mood, fear, tension, etc. By giving us a more personal insight you allow the reader to get a personal element.

You should also think about having one of your characters slip and fall, or the mass of bodies pushes some one over the edge, or just a random rock-fall takes a person out.

Look on it as the guy in the Red Shirt on Star Trek. That guy was the member of the away team you knew was gonna die. Now in terms of Star Trek that came to be a cliche and something humorous, but in this situation you ramp-up the tension and the risk that another character can die. I'm not suggesting you kill one of your main characters, but you create a character to serve this need. Doesn't need to be a big character, just someone for the reader to latch on to, and then lose. Makes everyone else in the party suddenly more vulnerable.

Hope this helps.

Besides focusing on individuals, start thinking of the problems.

FOOD: The higher up in the mountains you are, the less resources you have for food. So when was the large bulk food source area and where is the next one? Figure you need a minimum of one pound of food per person per day. That's five tons. Also identify where there will be enough area for ten thousand people to cook food.

WATER: Again, the higher into the mountains you go, the less sources of water that there are. Assuming one gallon of water per day per man. You need ten thousand gallons of water per day. Tanker trucks on the highway don't quite get up to that in capacity, and the average pool might have 3,000 gallons. By the way, each one of those gallons weighs eight pounds. Take your five tons of food and add in another 40 tons. Remember that carrying all this food and water costs additional calories.

SPEED: I'm assuming that only one person at a time can walk on the trail, i.e., no two or more abreast. Let's assume you have a walking speed of two miles per hour, and the bottleneck portion of the trail is one mile long. So the first person starts walking, taking half an hour to get over the trail. Next person starts four feet behind the first person (measured big toe to big toe). The last person leaves 7.7 hours later.

In other words, bare minimum is this is going to take all day to travel one mile, and during most of the day, you're fighting force is going to be badly divided. In other words, a high risk situation. And add into the time problem everything that goes wrong. When marcher number 34 trips, and wastes a minute getting up and going again, guess what that does to everyone behind him? You're going to have gridlock and the 2 mph average speed is going to disappear quickly.

Probably better figure on two days, at least, to get everybody over the pass. And don't forget to figure in the injury factor. You know one idiot, at a minimum, is going to break his leg. If a tenth of percent of the hikers get injured, you've got ten people to deal with. And how are they going to get over the pass?

Getting tense about how to do this in your book now?

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

Go outside and find yourself some location that has similar properties and think about, then record your own feelings and reactions.

I don't specifically mean find a dangerous mountain pass and make a crossing. Find a tall building and go stand on the roof and feel the wind. Find a similar tall building that has a balcony you can go stand-on and go to the edge and look down and feel the distance, imagine there's no handrail preventing you from plummeting. Go stand in a bus or rail station at rush-hour and feel the almost living tide of people sweeping you along. Go and walk and walk and walk and note the tightness in your legs, the ache of your feet, the pain in your lowerback and across your shoulders. Stand on the edge of a busy road and feel the danger of cars hurtling past you and know that if you slipped into the road, that would be it, and channel that fear and tension, replacing the location for the one in your book but keep every sensation because that's real.

Of course, you CAN go read about it. But if you experience it and translate that into your work, it'll feel much more intense and real.

Because it will be based on something you really did.

Something was bugging me about your response, and it finally dawned on me.

knight_tour said:

The crossing is rough - it begins in early morning and goes all through the night before the tribe reaches a vale that lies between the two mountains that they are crossing.

Click to expand...

Even with all the techniques of modern lighting, you'd only do this sort of operation at night because you're absolutely desperate. Without a lot of artificial lighting sources, this isn't going to work. With torches, it will be next to impossible.

You're going to have to shut down at night, leaving a divided force. Which means you have to be defensive on two separate fronts without an ability to easily transfer people.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

An argument about which way to go, they go that way and then have to go back and try the other way, causing a feud to open up between the supporters of the two...

But to answer your question, seems like there are scenes like that in the Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King.